A man looks at Ultra HD 4K displays at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Jan. 9.

Associated Press

Naughty America, a maker of pornographic films, is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot all of its adult entertainment material in ultra-high-definition.

Don’t blush. The company’s decision is an example of a larger trend that backers of UHD, including television makers like Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Co., say will help the technology avoid the same fate that met 3D TV: namely, that there will plenty of content for the fancy new devices, and soon.

As the two Korean television makers, and a bevy of Chinese and Japanese competitors, geared up to unveil new UHD TVs here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the question was whether there would be enough stuff to watch in the high-resolution format to entice consumers to pony up for an upgraded TV.

This week’s conference has mostly assuaged those fears. Over the past few days, there’s been a parade of announcements as content providers large and small, in conjunction with set makers and distribution services, pledge their commitment to creating content for UHD.

UHD is also known as 4K because of the 4,000-pixel horizontal resolution it offers. The technology offers resolution with four times the number of pixels as standard high definition picture quality. At the bigger end of the spectrum, household names like Amazon.com, which has said it will shoot all of its full original series this year in 4K, added details of a partnership with Warner Bros., Lionsgate, 20th Century Fox and Discovery to provide 4K content through its Instant Video service.

Similarly, Netflixsaid it would make the second season of its original hit drama, “House of Cards,” available in the new format this year on 4K TV’s manufactured by Sony, LG and others. Samsung said that it would release a “video pack” featuring popular Hollywood movies and documentaries from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and Paramount Pictures, with more for download as they become available.

Sony, which has its own giant content arm in the form of its Sony Pictures Entertainment unit, launched a 4K video download service last year with more than 140 films and TV shows.

The promise to consumers: buy a brand new spanking UHD TV, and there will be plenty of things to watch in the eye-popping new format.

For littler guys like Naughty America, a privately-held company based in San Diego, the intent is there too. But jumping into 4K is no minor undertaking.

In an interview on the sidelines of CES, Andreas Hronopoulos, the company’s 31-year-old chief executive, said Naughty America’s investment in creating 4K content was its biggest ever in technology — and definitely big enough to sink the company, should the format fail to take off.

Unlike with previous technologies, Mr. Hronopoulos says the barriers to entry with 4K are high for his company and many of its competitors.

Shooting and storing new content in UHD is a daunting task for a smaller outfit; a 30-minute video can take up one terabyte of memory, which needs to be backed up and accessible on servers, he said. That doesn’t come cheap.

Nor do new, fancy editing machines tailored for 4K content, like Apple Inc.'s new Mac Pro, which is necessary to ensure the color correction necessary to make the footage “pop,” as Mr. Hronopoulos puts it.

In spite of the costs, Mr. Hronopoulos is convinced that the investment will be worth it, because 4K hits at one of the most important selling points for his clientele: giving viewers the ability to feel like they’re really there.

“Yes, you need a lot of computing power,” he says. But given the demands of his customers, he added, “the closer we can come to making it feel like you’re there, the more successful we are.”

For access to the 4K content, Mr. Hronopoulos plans to charge $10 a month on top of the regular $24.95 monthly subscription for regular high definition. (Those who don’t want to upgrade can continue to access new content in regular high-def.)

Comparing his customers to sports fans and video gamers who seek out the ultra-realistic fantasy worlds created by video game companies, he added: “Our customers want to get as close to reality as they can get, without reality getting in the way.”